In the first half of the 19th century the Protestants dominated the field in China sending large numbers of missionaries to China who were the first to produce a number of important translations of the Bible as well as dictionaries into English. Printing a Chinese-Latin Dictionary in Hong Kong was part of an effort to redress the balance. It was edited by a Franciscan monk Hieronymus Mangieri da S. Arsenio (1804-1887) who arrived in Hong Kong in 1843.
The reason for the Latin language component is due to the fact that many Catholic converts had passed on their knowledge of Latin to their children and to some degree it had remained the lingua franca in China. Arsenio goes to great length to credit De Guignes (1759-1845) who came to Canton in 1784 as an emissary of King Louis XVIth while also working as a trading agent. In 1894 he accompanied the Dutch embassy under Titsingh to Peking and returned to Paris in 1801, having lived in the Far East for seventeen years. Napoleon Bonaparte was keen to expand trade with China and he financed de Guignes to compose the first edition of the Chinese-French-Latin Dictionary which was published in Paris in 1813. The present is, however, not simply a reprint of De Guignes first edition. Arsenio thoroughly re-edited and updated the translation dictionary of Chinese characters, dispensing with the French text.
The introduction states the following: “What can be considered more accurate, what more diligent, than a Dictionary? Especially that of M. de Guignes, and Father Gonçalves, undoubtedly both very learned men, and very well versed in Chinese idiom, who with immense labour and diligence not only collected the more common and useful Chinese characters, and arranged the collected ones in a own order, but also added explanations and various ways of pronunciation? Yet with all these aids, the young people and the Missionaries’ requirements were not sufficiently paid attention to. Although the previously lauded Dictionaries translated many characters, words and phrases, little advantage could be gained from them for the studies of the young, and for the Missionaries’ benefit. It is only suitable to those who have already made much progress in Chinese letters, nay, have spent their lives [in China]; and if someone were to give the young people who are learning the first rudiments of the language a dictionary to chew on, he would be doing no other than if he were to give bread to a child sucking at the mother’s breast. We therefore, in order to find some remedy for these inconveniences, which greatly held back the progress of learning both the Chinese language and literature, have devoted all our efforts to it, as far as possible, to revise the same Dictionary of Mr. de Guignes (which was considered worthy of greater attention) reduce it to a moderate volume, with greater clarity, and endowed with characters, words, and accents, we hope to help the progress of young people and Missionaries towards learning both [Chinese language and literature].” (translated from Latin p. vii). The reference to the dictionary by Gonçalves (1781-1841) refers to the ‘Lexicon Magnum Latino-Sinicum’, published in Macao in 1841, however Gonçalves did not publish a Chinese-Latin dictionary.
Cordier (Bibliotheca Sinica, 1590) notes that a large part of this edition was destroyed in a fire. As a consequence this dictionary is particularly rare.
